The Wall

John Lanchester’s thrilling and hypnotic work of fiction: a mystery story, a love story, a war story and a story about a voyage.

Kavanagh begins his life patrolling the Wall. If he’s lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he has only two years of this: 729 more nights. The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and never has to spend another day of his life anywhere near it. He longs for this to be over; longs to be somewhere else. The Wall is about why the young are right to distrust the old. It’s about a broken world you will recognise as your own - and about what might be found when all is lost.

"For a certain type of realistic novelist, a shift to speculative fiction — which allows the writer to invent as well as observe — can be liberating. The Wall revels in this opportunity, but it occasionally falters under Lanchester’s decision ... The novel gathers momentum as it goes, and few readers will stop until they reach its final page."  -  Alex Nevala-Lee, The New York Times Book Review

John Lanchester is an author and magazine contributor.  He is the author of novels including The Debt to Pleasure and Capital. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.